The role of IT security is expanding and this is being driven by new and evolving security use cases with valuable business implications. Gone are the days when the analysis of firewall, anti-virus, and intrusion detection logs were the critical focus for enterprise security teams. These sources painted a limited picture of what was happening from an “outside-in security perspective” providing a “black and white what-did-this-host-try-to-do viewpoint”. Analysis of these data sources alone was a reactive approach – typically providing more questions than answers.
This landscape has now evolved and the traditional technologies haven’t. New log sources such as, web proxy logs, email security logs, database access logs, physical security log data, and myriad of other log data from custom and packaged mission-critical applications have added new complexity and responsibilities to the security role. Analysis of these new sources allows security teams to understand user activity and behaviors, detect fraud, manage business risk and protect revenue. With these new responsibilities, incident and event management now means finding and understanding patterns of behavior in terabytes of log data over long periods of time. Longer-term security metrics baselines need to be created to understand how the security team should react to detected changes and interact with other groups to facilitate continuous monitoring for situational awareness.
Protecting against persistent threats, multi-vector attacks, zero day attacks, and other types of next generation threats require constant monitoring and analysis of an organization’s networks. Security information and event management (SIEM) solutions facilitate this effort by collecting log data from all the different system sensors across the enterprise. SIEM solutions can provide a visual dashboard view of all that event data, correlating it and generating analytics that give analysts insights into what is really happening and has happened across the network. They also offer the ability to drill down deeper into the source data for richer detail into the event logs and data.
Search and analyze all your IT data from one location in real-time. IT data such as all your logs, messages, configurations, metrics in virtual and non-virtual environments. With SIEM, silos of data are eliminated enabling organizations to make better use of their IT data.